Things depend on how you look at them.
Through what lenses do you examine possibilities?
The first 2 lenses are intellect and emotion.
Sometimes you use one, sometimes the other. This is normal.
Intellect employs hard facts and cold logic.
Emotion relies on soft intuition and warm connections.
Will the first impression be made in the head or in the heart?
In all your communications and attempts at persuasion – especially in your advertising – be careful to make a deep, dual impression; one track in the head and another in the heart.
But what happens after that first impression has been made? Are there other, smaller lenses that read the second, third, and fourth impressions?
Ray Bard is a quiet genius who speaks into my life. I walk away from each encounter a richer soul.
Ray recently told me that a careful examination of all the biggest nonfiction books of the past 50 years revealed 4 common characteristics. Ray is like that. He sees patterns that others miss and solves riddles that few have ever considered.
Unless you’re a nonfiction author, you don’t really care what makes a nonfiction book successful, do you? But what if I told you these same 4 characteristics are the keys to successful advertising? I saw that. Your ears perked up like a German Shepherd.
Communication, to be highly successful, must have:
1. A Big Idea
Concept
Insight
Information
2. Nuts & Bolts
How To
Step-by-Step
Instructions
Examples
3. Entertainment
Writing style
Anecdotes
Adventure
Surprise
4. Hope
Visualized Happiness
Promise
Inspiration
(1.) The Big Idea and (2.) Nuts and Bolts,
are more about the writer than the reader. Yet these are the only things every writer of nonfiction feels a need to share. And now you know why we churn out more than one million dull new books each year and why most of our advertising is gruel.
Dull communications are about the speaker, the author, the product, the advertiser. Lots of examples supporting a big idea are merely white noise – the sound of traffic in a too-busy world – when there’s no entertainment and no hope.
Successful nonfiction – including highly effective advertising – is about the reader, the listener, the viewer, the customer. These beloved messages deliver
(3.) Entertainment and (4.) Hope.
Ray Bard shared with you and me his Big Idea. We can use it to lift the effectiveness of our advertising to new heights. This should give you Hope. But if you want 2 days of Nuts and Bolts examples and Entertainment beyond compare, arrange your schedule to be at Wizard Academy April 10-11 to learn How to Write for Radio and the Internet, the highly heralded class of Christopher J. Maddock and Jeff Sexton.
I plan to add a few modest examples and I’m working to get the elusive Ray Bard to make an appearance and share additional wise-ard insights with you, though I can’t yet promise he’ll be there.
But I do have Hope.
Roy H. Williams
